Instagram Post 11/13/2019

It is not often that I have the opportunity to write about a restaurant so special that I am compelled to recommend it enthusiastically; Yin Ji Chang Fen, a well-known rice noodle roll chain from Guangzhou, China, made the cut. Recently opened at 91 Bayard St in Manhattan’s Chinatown, you can expect long lines so grab a take-out menu and hone your decisions while you’re waiting.

Cheung fan (Chinese rice rolls), amid alternate spellings, are enjoying a moment in the spotlight here in New York City. You’ve probably savored them at specialty venues, food trucks, and dim sum parlors; in essence they’re a thin roll of steamed rice noodle filled with seafood, meat, or vegetables or wrapped around youtiao (Chinese cruller). Now if you’ve been eating them forever, you’ll immediately recognize that these are a little different from what you’re accustomed to in at least three aspects: the noodle is thinner, they arrive doused with a bespoke soy sauce based mixture, and the proportion of filling to noodle is off the charts.

In addition to 16 kinds of chang fen, Yin Ji Chang Fen offers 14 varieties of congee (aka Chinese rice porridge), both with ample customizations available, and a few Asian snacks.

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Marinated Pork and Shrimp with Chives rice noodle roll; absolutely delicious. (Incidentally, portions are about twice as large as is customary around these parts.)

Inner workings: huge chunks of pork and whole shrimp.

Sliced Fish with Chives rice noodle roll. I thought I’d try an add-on so I asked for extra egg in this one. I was expecting to find the egg within, but what arrived was the rice roll as specified further enveloped in a thin omelet, a pleasant surprise.

Lai Wan Style Assorted Congee, topped with shredded egg, ginger, greens, peanuts and cilantro.

Inner workings revealed fish fillet, squid, pork skin, and more. Note that their congee may be a little thinner than what you’re used to. Although not canonical, you could unabashedly add some Spicy Chili Crisp, provided tableside, if you’re so inclined.

From the Asian Snacks side of the menu, Deep Fried Fish Skin; best I’ve ever had, ruined me for others.

Go here now. That is all.
 
 

Instagram Post 11/11/2019

Bensonhurst’s burgeoning Chinatown (yes, really) is home to a phalanx of Guangdong (Cantonese) and Hong Kong style restaurants as well as a few dim sum parlors (as you’d expect). The area is ripe for serious exploration, but to get things rolling my dining buddy and I did a survey of most of the eateries, noting which warranted further investigation. We settled on Seafood Palace, 2172 86th Street, Brooklyn, for lunch and despite the paucity of patrons that day, it did not disappoint.

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The menu calls this delectable item Sea Clams and Sweet Pea Pods with XO Sauce; the Chinese reads XO蜜豆桂花蚌 which I interpret as XO honey bean osmanthus mussel (or clam). The XO sauce part is a gimme and honey bean refers to sugar snap peas. The clams looked and tasted exactly like sweet razor clams but I’m told that “osmanthus clam” refers to something dissimilar. (For a more, shall we say, graphic description of osmanthus clams, see this post.) Assuming you like clams, treat yourself to this eminently accessible dish served with a mildly spicy sauce enhanced with ginger, scallions, green chili, red chili, Chinese chives, purple onion and what I suspect were tiny nubs of flavorful pork. Definitely good eats.

Pan Fried Egg with Noodlefish was a tasty, unpretentious dish obviously prepared with great care and admirable skill. The scrambled eggs were light, fluffy, pillowy and moist and the kind of preparation you’d expect from French cuisine. Noodlefish, aka ice fish, are related to smelts, so watch for the few unavoidable tiny bones.

And yes, I’m going back. Soon.
 
 

Instagram Post 10/12/2019

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Quick post about newish King Dumplings at 74 Hester St in Manhattan’s Chinatown; quick, because all we had time for was a plate of agreeable fried chive & pork dumplings (featuring one attempting an escape) – 4 for $1.50. According to reports, all dumplings are handmade by the chef of Prosperity Dumpling. The menu includes additional items like fried buns, sesame pancake sandwiches, and soups; frozen dumplings in quantities of 50 are available as well.

Innermost recesses – to give you an idea of the thickness of the skin and quantity of the filling.
 
 

Instagram Post 9/30/2019

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Many years ago, when I was investigating every single vendor (🐷🤷‍♂️) in the New World Mall Food Court, 136-20 Roosevelt Ave, Flushing, for my food tours, I was intrigued by the options at stall number 4, Old Luo Yang (Luòyáng is a city in Henan province). The phrase “Processed Noodle” grabbed my attention; seems like it was intended to describe Liang Pi (Cold Skin) Noodles which do indeed involve an elaborate process in their preparation: make a flour and water dough, irrigate it with more water, rinse it, discard the dough reserving the liquid, let it rest overnight to form a precipitate, dispose of the topmost liquid, pour remaining paste onto a tray, steam over boiling water, and slice into noodles. And that, dear reader, is a gross oversimplification.

For all that effort, the resulting noodles don’t have much flavor of their own; it’s more about what you do with them and every vendor/restaurant has a different strategy. Their flagship dish, Old Luo Yang Processed Noodle, arrives on a flat plate with so much (absolutely delicious) sauce, that it invariably spills onto the tray, and spills significantly. Mess notwithstanding, however, I strongly suggest that if it’s your first time here, that’s the one to order.

They have another area of distinction: they add vegetable juice to the recipe, infusing the noodles with color (but not really much additional flavor); adding carrot juice produces an orange noodle, then there’s spinach green, black rice, and purple sweet potato, shown here. The order comes with bean sprouts, slivers of cucumber, and gluten (looks like cubes of bread that soak up sauce like nothing else on the plate) plus (this is the altered part) three containers of sauce. The first time I ordered this, I wasn’t certain about how much of each sauce to use: I tried a bit of each individually, then in combination, and wasn’t really satisfied until I realized that the best approach was to use every drop of all three.

Maybe the inevitable overflow was the reason behind the division, maybe it was to account for varying tastes, but I found that for best results, combine everything together – including every dram of all three sauces – mix well, make a mess, and enjoy.